Huge outcry halts work on Baghdad's 'Great Wall'

Liz Sly, Tribune foreign correspondent; a special correspondent in Adhamiyah contributed to this reportCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The U.S. military calls it the Great Wall of Adhamiyah, outraged Iraqis have dubbed it the Sectarian Wall and Arab commentators are drawing dark comparisons with the security barrier Israel is building in the West Bank.

The U.S. military's construction of a concrete wall around the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah, billed as one of the "centerpieces" of the latest strategy to pacify Baghdad, has instead triggered a torrent of outrage among Iraq's Sunnis and across the region.

On Monday, the U.S. military announced that it had suspended construction of the 3-mile wall after an appeal by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

But U.S. officials also defended the effort to turn Adhamiyah, a known insurgent stronghold, into a "gated community," and an Iraqi military spokesman vowed to press ahead with the wall, leaving its fate shrouded in confusion.

"Obviously, we will respect the wishes of the Iraqi government," Ryan Crocker, the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said Monday at his first news conference in Baghdad. He said he was not sure what the status of the wall is now but insisted its only goal was "to bring security to the people" of the area.

As common as palm trees

There is nothing particularly unusual about the sprouting of another barrier in fortified Baghdad, where towering concrete blast walls have become as much a part of the scenery as palm trees.

The walls block access to police stations, hotels, hospitals, political party offices and the homes of politicians, snarling traffic in all directions. They also seal off U.S. military bases and surround the 6-square-mile Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and top Iraqi politicians are housed.

It also is not the first time the U.S. military has sought to use barriers to address Baghdad's violence. Last summer's failed Baghdad security plan included a project, announced by President Bush, to encircle the entire city with a series of trenches and berms aimed at keeping terrorists out. The barrier never was built.

But the Adhamiyah wall, the first aimed at sealing off an ordinary Baghdad community, would set off an almost exclusively Sunni community from the almost exclusively Shiite neighborhoods around it, stirring allegations that the U.S. is seeking to perpetuate and cement Baghdad's sectarian divide.

Several thousand residents took to the streets of Adhamiyah on Monday to demand that the wall's construction be stopped, carrying banners declaring "No to the Sectarian Wall" and "We reject the American Iranian plan," the latter a reference to the perceived pro-Iranian sympathies of the Iraqi government.

"This is the beginning of a huge plan intended to divide Baghdad ethnically and according to sect," said Sheik Sameer Al-Obaidi, the imam of Adhamiyah's main Abu Hanifa mosque.

The chief spokesman for Iraqi security forces in Baghdad insisted that construction would proceed and pledged to build walls around other Baghdad neighborhoods, including the vast Shiite enclave of Sadr City.

"We will continue to construct these barriers in all areas of Baghdad without exception," said Brig. Gen. Qassem al-Musawi. He said al-Maliki's objections to the wall, voiced while on a visit to Cairo on Sunday, were based on exaggerated news reports.

Making comparisons

"Some say it's like the Great Wall of China, some that it's like the Berlin Wall. This is exaggerating the issue," al-Musawi said. "We anticipated that there would be reactions by weak-minded people to provoke a crisis and undermine the security plan."

In fact, critics appear to have a different wall in mind -- the one being built to separate Israel from the West Bank.

"People of Adhamiyah, rise up and destroy this wall ... produced by Israeli factories in Tel Aviv!" said a commentary in the Iraqi daily Al-Zaman. "These are the same barriers that isolated Palestinian villages and cities from each other ... under the pretext of defending Israel security."

The parallel was drawn by Arab newspapers across the region, which has leapt upon the wall project as evidence of what the influential Al-Hayat described as "Israel's infiltration of our homelands."

"The separation barrier is an Israeli product imported by Americans to the heart of Baghdad," the London-based Arab daily said.

U.S. officials appear to have been caught off-guard by the intensity of the emotions stirred by the project.

"The intention in Adhamiyah, as it is elsewhere, is clearly not to segregate communities or to engage in a form of political or social engineering," Crocker said. "It's to try and identify where the fault lines are, where avenues of attack lie, and set up the barriers literally to prevent those attacks."

In a news release last week that referred to the project as the Great Wall of Adhamiyah, the U.S. military said the wall would make it harder for Shiite death squads to penetrate the Sunni neighborhood, and for Sunni insurgents to transport bombs from Adhamiyah to Shiite areas.

"In fact, the concept is closer to an exclusive gated community in the U.S. than it is to China's great wall," the statement said.

But many Arabs see something far more sinister.

"The winds of sectarianism warn of a season of unending walls," commentator Ghassan al-Sarbal lamented in a separate opinion piece in Al-Hayat. "Perhaps it is too late to wage a comprehensive campaign against the epidemic of walls."